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Search results for 'GLORY'Tue, 03 Mar 2015 15:36:43 -0500Liveleakhttp://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/logo.gifLiveleak.com Rss Feed - Search results for 'GLORY'http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=GLORY
One little critter a redback is no match forMon, 02 Mar 2015 17:15:33 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=371_1425333894
TeslagraafI've been waiting to get a better video of this small spider wasp hunting a
redback but it looks like she's finished stuffing her glory hole full of
spiderly goodness. Anyway this is one ally we have against those
8-legged fookers. Although it was discovered over 200 years ago,
Agenioideus nigricornis was just thought of as another thing that could
probably sting you here in Australia. Only in recent years was it
discovered they prey on redbacks.
What I find interesting is how
this wasp can crawl through a redback's tangled web hunting for the
owner without getting caught up. I'm not sure if they know to avoid the
sticky parts, or whether they have a special coating on their legs. But I
saw her go into a web and by the time I grabbed the camera - probably
not even 10 seconds later - she was already dragging the spider to the
nest.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=371_1425333894TeslagraafOne little critter a redback is no match forAgenioideus nigricornis, killer, of, redbacksUKRAINE BECOMES GATEWAY FOR JIHADMon, 02 Mar 2015 15:40:33 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aab_1425325987
Tatzhit
Khalid, who uses a pseudonym, leads the Islamic State's underground branch in Istanbul. He came from Syria to help control the flood of volunteers arriving in Turkey from all over the world, wanting to join the global jihad. Now, he wanted to put me in touch with Ruslan, a "brother" fighting with Muslims in Ukraine.
The "brothers" are members of ISIS and other underground Islamic organizations, men who have abandoned their own countries and cities. Often using pseudonyms and fake identities, they are working and fighting in the Middle East, Africa and the Caucasus, slipping across borders without visas. Some are fighting to create a new Caliphate - heaven on earth. Others - like Chechens, Kurds and Dagestanis - say they are fighting for freedom, independence and self-determination. They are on every continent, and in almost every country, and now they are in Ukraine, too.
In the West, most look at the war in Ukraine as simply a battle between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government. But the truth on the ground is now far more complex, particularly when it comes to the volunteer battalions fighting on the side of Ukraine. Ostensibly state-sanctioned, but not necessarily state-controlled, some have been supported by Ukrainian oligarchs, and others by private citizens. Less talked about, however, is the Dudayev battalion, named after the first president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and founded by Isa Munayev, a Chechen commander who fought in two wars against Russia.
Ukraine is now becoming an important stop-off point for the brothers, like Ruslan. In Ukraine, you can buy a passport and a new identity. For $15,000, a fighter receives a new name and a legal document attesting to Ukrainian citizenship. Ukraine doesn't belong to the European Union, but it's an easy pathway for immigration to the West. Ukrainians have few difficulties obtaining visas to neighboring Poland, where they can work on construction sites and in restaurants, filling the gap left by the millions of Poles who have left in search of work in the United Kingdom and Germany.
You can also do business in Ukraine that's not quite legal. You can earn easy money for the brothers fighting in the Caucasus, Syria and Afghanistan. You can "legally" acquire unregistered weapons to fight the Russian-backed separatists, and then export them by bribing corrupt Ukrainian customs officers.
"Our goal here is to get weapons, which will be sent to the Caucasus," Ruslan, the brother who meets me first in Kiev, admits without hesitation.
WITH HIS WHITE hair and beard, Ruslan is still physically fit, even at 57. He's been a fighter his entire adult life. Born in a small mountain village in the Caucasus, on the border between Dagestan and Chechnya, Ruslan belongs to an ethnic minority known as the Lak, who are predominantly Sunni Muslim.
The world that Ruslan inhabits - the world of the brothers - is something new. When he first became a fighter, there wasn't any Internet or cell phones, or cameras on the street, or drones. Ruslan joined the brothers when the Soviet Union collapsed, and he went to fight for a better world, first against the Russians in Chechnya and Dagestan during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. He then moved to Azerbaijan, where he was eventually arrested in 2004 on suspicion of maintaining contact with al Qaeda.
full article on The Intercept's website, out of respect for the journalist's work if nothing else]
...
After his release from prison in Azerbaijan, Ruslan became the eternal wanderer, a rebel - and one of the brothers now in Ukraine. He came because Munayev, now head of the Dudayev battalion, decided the brothers should fight in Ukraine. "I am here today because my brother, Isa, called us and said, 'It's time to repay your debt,'" Ruslan says. "There was a time when the brothers from Ukraine came and fought against the common enemy, the aggressor, the occupier."
That debt is to Ukrainians like Oleksandr Muzychko, who became one of the brothers, even though he never converted to Islam. Muzyczko, along with other Ukrainian volunteers, joined Chechen fighters and took part in the first Chechen war against Russia**. He commanded a branch of Ukrainian volunteers, called "Viking," which fought under famed Chechen militant leader Shamil Basayev. Muzychko died last year in Ukraine under mysterious circumstances
...
IN THE 17th century, the area to the east of the Dnieper River was known as the "wilderness," an ungoverned territory that attracted refugees, criminals and peasants - a place beyond the reach of the Russian empire. Today, this part of Ukraine plays a similar role, this time for Muslim brothers. In eastern Ukraine, the green flag of jihad flies over some of the private battalions' bases.
For many Muslims, like Ruslan, the war in Ukraine's Donbass region is just the next stage in the fight against the Russian empire. It doesn't matter to them whether their ultimate goal is a Caliphate in the Middle East, or simply to have the Caucuses free of Russian influence - the brothers are united not by nation, but by a sense of community and solidarity.
But the brothers barely have the financial means for fighting or living. They are poor, and very rarely receive grants from the so-called Islamic humanitarian organizations. They must earn money for themselves, and this is usually done by force. Amber is one of the ideas Ruslan has for financing the "company of brothers" fighting in eastern Ukraine - the Dudayev battalion, which includes Muslims from several nations, Ukrainians, Georgians, and even a few Russians.
The brothers had hoped the Ukrainian authorities would appreciate their dedication and willingness to give their lives in defense of Ukrainian sovereignty, but they miscalculated. Like other branches of fighters - Aidar, Azov and Donbass - the government, for the most part, ignores them. They're armed volunteers outside the control of Kiev, and Ukraine's politicians also fear that one day, instead of fighting Russians in the east, the volunteers will turn on the government in Kiev. So ordinary people help the volunteers, but it's not enough. The fighters associated with the Ukrainian nationalist Right Sector get money, cars and houses from the rich oligarchs.
Ruslan has a different plan. He's afraid that if they begin stealing from the rich, the Ukrainian government will quickly declare their armed branch illegal. He's decided to work in the underground economy - uncontrolled by the state - which the brothers know best.
Back in the '90s, the amber mines in the vast forests surrounding the city of Rivne were state-owned and badly run, so residents began illegally mining; it was a chance at easy money. Soon, however, the mafia took over. For the right daily fee, miners could work and sell amber to the mafia at a fixed price: $100 per kilogram. The mafia conspired with local militia, prosecutors and the governor. That was the way business worked.
...
At one point, Ruslan disappeared in Rivne for several weeks. When he returned, he was disappointed; he'd failed to convince the local mafia to cooperate with the brothers' fight for an independent Ukraine. But now, he has other arguments to persuade them. His men are holding up the mines, by not allowing anyone into the forest. Either the local gangsters share their profits, or no one will get paid.
Ruslan doesn't like this job. He knows it won't bring him any glory, and could land him in prison. He would have preferred to be among the fighters at the front lines, where everything is clear and clean. He says he can still fight, but he's already too old to really endure the rigors of battle, even if he doesn't want to admit it. He may still be physically fit, but fighters don't usually last longer than a few years. Then they lose their strength and will to fight.
He has other orders from Munayev: he's supposed to organize a "direct response group" in Kiev. The group will be a sort of rear echelon unit that take care of problems, like if someone tries to discredit the Dudayev battalion. It will also collect debts or scare off competition. There's no doubt the new branch will work behind the lines, where there isn't war, but there is money - as long as you know where to get it. If need be, the direct response group volunteers will watch over the mines in Rivne, or "will acquire" money from illegal casinos, which operate by the hundreds in Kiev.
Ruslan sends me photos of the group's criminal exploits: they came into the casinos with weapons, and broke into the safes and slot machines. They disappeared quickly, and were never punished. The money went to food, uniforms, boots, tactical vests and other equipment necessary for the fighters. The mafia knows they can't beat them at this game. The brothers are too good, because they are armed and experienced in battle. The police aren't interested in getting involved either. In the end, it's illegal gambling.
I told Ruslan that it's a dangerous game. He laughed.
"It's child's play," he says. "We used to do this in Dagestan. No one will lift a finger. Don't worry."
RUSLAN FINALLY DROVE me to see his "older brother," to Isa Munayev, and his secret base located many miles west of Donetsk.
Riding in an old Chrysler that Ruslan bought in Poland, we drove for several hours, on potholed and snowy roads. Ruslan had glued to the car one of the emblems of Ukraine's ATO, the so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation, which includes both soldiers and volunteers in the fight against separatists.
The bumper sticker allows him to drive through police traffic stops without being held up - or if he is stopped, they won't demand bribes as they do from other drivers. The ATO sticker, Ruslan's camouflage uniform, and a gun in his belt are enough to settle matters. Policemen salute him and wish him good luck.
He drives fast, not wanting to rest, sleep or even drink coffee. If he stops, it's to check the compass on his belt to check the direction of Mecca. When it's time to pray, he stops the car, turns off the engine, places his scarf in the snow and bows down to Allah.
Asked whether - after so many hardships, after so many years, and at his age, almost 60 now - he would finally like to rest, he answered indignantly, "How could I feel tired?"
There's much more work to do, according to Ruslan. "There's been a small result, but we will rest only when we've reached our goals," he says. "I'm carrying out orders, written in the Holy Quran. 'Listen to God, the Prophet.' And I listen to him and do what I'm told."
On the way into the city of Kryvyi Rih, we met with Dima, a young businessman - under 40 - but already worth some $5 million. He's recently lost nearly $3 million from his business in Donetsk, which has been hit hard by the war. Dima worked for Igor Kolomoisky, one of the oligarchs who had been funding Ukraine's volunteer battalions. Dima and Ruslan have only known each other for a short time. Ruslan claimed Dima owed him a lot of money, although it's unclear from what. Ruslan kept bothering him, threatening to blackmail him. Finally, he got $20,000 from Dima.
That's not nearly enough to support the Dudayev battalion. But Ruslan had something bigger to offer Dima: amber. Now, Dima was ready to talk. He came up with the idea to find buyers in the Persian Gulf, including wealthy sheikhs. They would like to sell an entire house of amber: furniture, stairs, floors, and inlaid stones. It only takes contacts, and Ruslan has them. The brothers from Saudi Arabia like to help the jihad in the Caucasus and the Middle East.
The next day, Ruslan was behind the wheel again. The old Chrysler barely moved, its engine overheated. A mechanic with an engineering degree and experience working in Soviet arms factories connected a plastic bottle filled with dirty water to the radiator using a rubber hose.
"I don't know how long I'll last," Ruslan says suddenly. "It depends on God. I'll probably die on this road. But I don't have any other road to take.
By Marcin Mamon
Source page: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/26/midst-war-ukraine-becomes-gateway-europe-jihad/
P.S. Side note from the poster: Worth noting that men from the Caucasus sometimes seen in the ranks of Donbass militias, and often called &quot;islamist Chechen mercenaries&quot;, are usually in fact Ossetians (and probably Christian as ~70% of Ossetians are Christian).
They have come for a rematch of a 2008 war, when USA-installed Yuschenko government in Ukraine supplied USA-installed Saakashvili in Georgia with weapons to destroy their homeland.
Now, Saakashvili is wanted on charges of corruption and violations of human rights in Georgia, so he and other colonial managers from his team have moved to Ukraine.
They hold key positions in Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Justice, and Ministry of Health, while Georgians associated with Saakashvili's regime make up possibly the most numerous foreign contingent among pro-government paramilitaries. Small wonder that this conflict is where volunteers from both sides go to settle old scores.http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aab_1425325987TatzhitUKRAINE BECOMES GATEWAY FOR JIHADUkraine, Isa Munaev, Dudaev, islamist, ISISBloody Humor: Satanic Nazi Parties in Kiev Go Mad Sun, 01 Mar 2015 10:48:49 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c0a_1425224566
104JebackaBrigadaEating Baby Cake on Russian flag? WTF?
Slitting a throat, ripping out a liver, crucifying a boy under Nazi themes - these are just "funny" performances staged in Kiev.A
group of young people in Kiev decided to celebrate the Lent's first day
with a "Bloody Pastor's Ball" - a performance that was originally aimed
at "refuting myths about Nazism in Ukraine". However, the party turned
out a bit too real.
Accompanied by a militaristic march, a man dressed as inquisitor
approached the public with a Bandera portrait in hands, guarded by a
group of masked young people dressed in Hitler-stylized and military
uniforms, wielding automatic guns.
A man representing a captive, with his hands tied, was brought to his
knees and "executed". A couple of moments later, the "bloody pastor"
put an animal liver on the table, saying: "A self-defender's
liver. In the glory of Bandera!" "If someone wants to drive a spike
in this heart, you're welcome", he added.
Earlier, the notorious BarHot organized a similar performance of "crucifying a boy".
The general idea was to mock myths about and exaggeration of the
ideological situation in modern Ukraine. However, is seems the ones who
attended the performances certainly crossed a moral line.
The same bar hosted a party with guests slicing and eating a cake depicting a baby lying on the Russian flag.
The Euromaidan coup in Ukraine spawned ultra-nationalist and radical
groups such as the Right Sector. When the Donbas conflict flared up,
several military "volunteer" battalions, which resort to the Nazi
ideology, were organized.
After the difficult February Minsk talks, the official Kiev and
self-proclaimed eastern republics reached a ceasefire agreement.
However, the Right Sector said it would not recognize the deal. Several
videos show the sad ideological background of the military groups that
praise Adolf Hitler and Stephan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist of the
WWII.
Also, Ukraine was one of the three countries (along with Canada and
the USA) that voted against the UN resolution condemning the
glorification of Nazism.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150301/1018920739.html#ixzz3T9JbC1dGhttp://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c0a_1425224566104JebackaBrigadaBloody Humor: Satanic Nazi Parties in Kiev Go Mad Bloody Humor: ,Satanic Nazi ,Parties in Kiev, Go Mad Hawker Nimrod Mk.I S1581 Sun, 01 Mar 2015 09:52:52 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f58_1425221157
Moe BedickThe Nimrod was effectively the naval equivalent of the Hawker Fury Mk.I,
albeit with a few modifications to suit her life on the seas. The
prototype of the 'Norn' as she was initially known first flew in August
1930 and following successful trials an order for 42 Nimrod Mk.I
aircraft was placed. The first six examples to enter service were with
402 Fleet Fighter Flight aboard HMS Courageous replacing their Fairey
Flycatchers.The Nimrod never fired her guns in anger, but served well with both the
Home and Mediterranean Fleets. The last Nimrods to fly operationally
were with 802 NAS, when they were replaced by Sea Gladiators at Hal Far,
Malta, in May 1939. The very last Nimrod in Fleet Air Arm service was
Mk.I S1582, which was being used as a hack with 753 NAS undertaking
weather checks until she was paid off in January 1942.The substantial remains of S1581 were recovered from a scrapyard in West
London in the early 1970s and donated to the RAF Museum. The remains
passed to Viv Bellamy in the early 1980s to act as a pattern for his
Fury replica, but were then purchased in 1994 by Aero Vintage who set
about restoring this magnificent machine back to her former glory.http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f58_1425221157Moe BedickHawker Nimrod Mk.I S1581 Aircraft,HistoryThe rise of fascism is again the issueSat, 28 Feb 2015 17:59:40 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6c4_1425161912
demonizedworldBy John Pilger
http://johnpilger.com/
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness.
Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
"To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust
would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission.
Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most were under the age of ten".
The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew ... that if we waited one more day," said President Barack Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.
For Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars.
The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".
Following Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, "confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency".
The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to Western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes , claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" might have been murdered.
Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines".
A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics.
The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation - and the implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country.
It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America's modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as "sanctions". The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
"Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over." These were opening words of Obama's 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.
"The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion," said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed - civilians and soldiers - during Obama's time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion ... Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation."
He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then president Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers.
"Every girl," recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, "could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported."
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former secretary of state Cyrus Vance later admitted, "there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity ". Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the "threat of a promising example".
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized support for tribal "fundamentalist" groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that "the United States' larger interests ... would be served by the demise of , despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." The italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by prime minister Margaret Thatcher as a "freedom fighter".
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and "destabilise" the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, "a few stirred up Muslims".
His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them.
Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called "Operation Cyclone". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah - who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help - was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
The "blowback" of Operation Cyclone and its "few stirred up Muslims" was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer's message was and remains: "You are with us or against us."
The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and "collatoral damage". In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians ("gooks") were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered.
In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world's greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama's victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA "kill list" presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room.
He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each "hit" is registered on a faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".
"For goose-steppers," wrote the historian Norman Pollock, "substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception."
This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates Western culture.
I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the "tragedy" of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places - just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood's violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a "patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days".
There are no heroic movies about America's embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens - as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry". If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No Western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe - with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine.
At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism". It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading "neo-con" luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.
Nuland's coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea - illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 - voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the Western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion".
The Nato commander, General Breedlove - whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove - announced that 40,000 Russian troops were "massing". In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine - a third of the population - have long sought a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history". In the American and British media, this was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint".
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army".
There were "individual citizens" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev's Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for "full scale war" with nuclear-armed Russia.
On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly.
"Yet across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established ... If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason."
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack .... In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons."
In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. "Putin must be stopped," said the headline. "And sometimes only guns can stop guns." He conceded that the threat of war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that "America has the best kit".
In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones." He lauded Blair as a "Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote, "Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran."
The outbursts - or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" - are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber.
On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: "The F-35. GREAT For Britain". This American "kit" will cost British taxpayers 1.3 billion pounds (US$2 billion), its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas "investment". She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.
They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son is on the board of Ukraine's biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine's rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine's mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia's long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states.
Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6c4_1425161912demonizedworldThe rise of fascism is again the issueamerica,fascism,west,europe,world,war,nazi,government,propaganda,ISIS,islam,middel east,russia,nato,china,mujahdeen,afgahnistanWhy the rise of fascism is again the issueFri, 27 Feb 2015 15:04:56 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ac9_1425066924
Bealeo
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
"To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most were under the age of ten".
The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew... that if we waited one more day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.
For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".
Following Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, "confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency".
The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes , claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation - and the implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America's modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as "sanctions". The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
"Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over." These were opening words of Obama's 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. "The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion," said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed - civilians and soldiers - during Obama's time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives', Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion... Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation." He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. "Every girl," recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, "could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported."
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, "there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity ". Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the "threat of a promising example".
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised support for tribal "fundamentalist" groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that "the United States' larger interests... would be served by the demise of , despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." The italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a "freedom fighter".
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and "destabilise" the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, "a few stirred up Muslims". His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called "Operation Cyclone". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah - who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help - was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
The "blowback" of Operation Cyclone and its "few stirred up Muslims" was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer's message was and remains: "You are with us or against us."
The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and "collatoral damage". In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians ("gooks") were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world's greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama's victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA "kill list" presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each "hit" is registered on a faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".
"For goose-steppers," wrote the historian Norman Pollock, "substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception." This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the "tragedy" of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places - just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood's violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, 'American Sniper', which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a "patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days".
There are no heroic movies about America's embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens - as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry". If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe - with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism". It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading "neo-con" luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.
Nuland's coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea - illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 - voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion". The Nato commander, General Breedlove - whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - announced that 40,000 Russian troops were "massing". In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine - a third of the population - have long sought a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history". In the American and British media, this was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint".
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army". There were "individual citizens" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev's Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for "full scale war" with nuclear-armed Russia.
On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established... If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason."
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack... In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons." In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. "Putin must be stopped," said the headline. "And sometimes only guns can stop guns." He conceded that the threat of war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that "America has the best kit".
In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones." He lauded Blair as a "Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote, "Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran."
The outbursts - or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" - are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: "The F-35. GREAT For Britain". This American "kit" will cost British taxpayers lb1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas "investment". She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son is on the board of Ukraine's biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine's rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine's mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia's long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.
26 February 2015, written by John Pilger
http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issuehttp://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ac9_1425066924BealeoWhy the rise of fascism is again the issueJohn Pilger, Ukraine, fascism, DON'T BLAME ISIS: Iran is Destroying Iraq's Cultural HeritageThu, 26 Feb 2015 18:54:15 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bc1_1424993491
MrPhilbyAloisStrange things are happening in Iraq. At Firdosi Square in Baghdad there was once a gigantic statue of Comrade Saddam, soaring towards heaven like an axis mundi of sorts. Those with their memory intact do perhaps recall that the invading American vermin toppled the statue of Comrade Saddam in a staged media event. This risible hullabaloo allegedly foreshadowed Iraq's transition
from Baathist tyranny to American style democracy. As we all well know, things did not quite turn out this way. The Americans constitue a mentally inferior human type, and bequeathing the responsibility of nation-building to creatures belonging up in a tree is tantamount to asking a seasoned pimp to lecture a nunnery on the merits of virginity.
Enough of this digression on the Yankee simians; let us return to Firdosi Square:
At Firdosi Square, where the statue of Comrade Saddam once stood, we are met by gigantic billboards with images of past and present Ayatollahs of Iran. This appalling act of provocation is a firm indicator as to the unabashed sectarianism permeating the Iraqi society. Things were not always so: during the reign of Comrade Saddam, the great dividing line was not between Sunni and Shia but between those who adhered to the principles of Baathist nationalism and those beholden to religious obscurantism (the worst culprits in this regard were typically the socially conservative Shias of Southern Iraq). Intermarriage amongst Baathists negated sectarian divisions, and Comrade Saddam, one of the greatest Arab visionaries and a true Kulturmensch with a formidable sense of history, sought to construct an Iraqi super-culture which would deliver the final blow to all sectarianism. As Comrade Saddam saw things, his Baathist regime stood in a direct line of continuity with the great Assyrian and Babylonian empires of the past. Furthermore, Comrade Saddam was heir not only to Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar, but also to Al Mothanna ibn Haritha the scourge of the Persians and Saladin the crusher of the crusaders. This majestic vision is articulated with gusto in Ardulfurataini Watan, a remarkable piece of Baathist poetry. I want you to reflect carefully on the following words; these are not idle utterances - rather they bespeak a definite national vision, and it is a profound lesson in history:
Vaterland spreads its wings over the horizon
And wears the glory of civilisations
Blessed be the land of the two rivers
Vaterland of glorious determination and tolerance
This homeland is made of flame and splendour
And pride unmatched by the highest heaven.
It is a mountain that rises above the tops of the world
And a plain that embodies our pride
Babylon is within us and Assyria within us too
And because of the glory of our lineage
History itself radiates with light
We alone who possess the anger of the sword
And the patience of the prophets
When we forged the sands of Arabia into a revolution
And bore the flag of history as ideology
Since Al Mothanna marched onwards
And Saladin covered with spears
There was of course much more to Iraq than mere nationalist oratory. Comrade Saddam created a secular welfare state that became the pride of the Arab world. Educated foreign workers from East Germany, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union shared their know-how with a regime that was intent on turning Iraq into the Germany of the Middle East. Christians could occupy elevated political and bureaucratic positions in a majority Muslim country and openly confess their creed. Comrade Saddam, the Kulturmensch that he was, emphasised the need for academic excellence for all - including women. Given this, the following observations of Rania Khalek are spot on:
"Contrary to popular imagination, Iraqi women enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'athist government than women in other Middle Eastern countries. In fact, equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq's Constitution in 1970, including the right to vote, run for political office, access education and own property. Prior to the devastating economic sanctions of the 1990s, Iraq's education system was top notch and female literacy rates were the highest in the region, reaching 87 percent in 1985. Education was a major priority for Saddam Hussein's regime, so much so that in 1982 Iraq received the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) award for eradicating illiteracy."
This was the burgeoning Iraqi national project that was torpedoed by a deranged homosexual Ayatollah intent on exporting his Islamic revolution to his neighbouring countries and subsequently aborted by the American barbarians and their stooges. This was the assault of Untermenschen who themselves possess no culture on the citadel of Kultur an sich. In the words of James Petras, the war on Iraq
"was not a 'war' against a dictator, nor even a simply ugly massacre of the Iraqi people, it is the
deliberate destruction of a civilization carried out by modern barbarians - modern barbarians combining high-tech weapons of mass destruction, directed at destroying homes, factories, offices, water treatment facilities, public utilities with primitive vandals and paramilitary forces destroying the heritage of 5000 years of civilization and 30 years of a modern secular Arab state. Vandals unleashed to incinerate the archives of a nation, its libraries and research institutes, to strip the most famous archeological museum of priceless antiquities and jewels of Islamic art, to destroy universities, school records, hospitals, documents detailing the most important aspects of modern Iraqi life as well as Iraqi national heritage. This is the systematic destruction of everything which allows a people to exist as a recognized nation."
In the light of these astute observations of Petras, it is the epitome of hypocrisy to accuse ISIS of destroying the Iraqi heritage when the American enemies of Kultur have done exactly the same, and that far more intensively and extensively.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, the destruction of the libraries in Mosul and the iconoclastic frenzy that we have witnessed lately are not the misdeeds of native Iraqis; rather we are dealing with a mere footnote to the destruction of the Iraqi heritage that was inititiated by the Americans more than a decade ago. Those responsible for this vile but minuscule cultural destruction are foreign provocateurs. The quesion that must be asked is the following: at whose behest are they acting? We should be pointing our fingers at Iran.
So stupified are Westerners by the bugbear called ISIS that they have become oblivious to the terrorists and infiltrators doing Iran's bidding in Iraq. These are the observations of Ali Khedery, an American diplomat:
"The staunchly pro-Iranian Badr Organization commander Hadi al-Ameri - who was welcomed in the Oval Office by Obama in 2011, and is known for favoring power drills to murder his victims - has been tasked with leading all Iraqi efforts to secure and pacify the strategically important province of Diyala. These militia leaders are not only operating outside the Iraqi government's control; many key figures are deeply embedded within Baghdad's power structure. Hakim al-Zamili, an Iranian-backed militia commander notorious for ethnically cleansing Baghdad of its Sunni inhabitants while serving as Maliki's deputy health minister, is now chairman of the Iraqi Parliament's security and defense committee."
More alarmingly:
"This constellation of Iranian-backed militias is eclipsing official Iraqi institutions, and sowing the seeds of conflict for decades to come."
Given these circumstances, it should surprise no one that the Sunnis of Iraq have no one to turn to except ISIS. But ISIS itself is no more than a loose designation for a multitude of belligerent entities with contanstly shifting alliances amongst each other. Your friend of today is your foe of tomorrow. This is the perfect climate for Iranian infiltrators who, unlike the ignorant American enemies of Kultur, have historical reasons for wiping out the cultural heritage of their perennial adversary. Now, the Iranians are a most peculiar people and it is in your own best interest to learn a thing or two about this nation of double-dealers (zahir-batin):
"As we know the Persian in history, he is a born liar. He is, therefore, a born conspirator. He has great quickness of mind, adaptability, and, apart from religious emotion, no conscience. In the third century of the Hijra (the ninth A.D.), the Persians were either devoted Shiites or simple unbelievers. The one class would do anything for the descendants of Ali; the other, anything for themselves. This second class, further, would by preference combine doing something for themselves with doing something against the Arabs, the conquerors of their country."
The latest spectacle of the cultural destruction in Mosul, a former Baathist stronghold, appears to me as being just another instance of the Persian-Iranian habit of "doing something against the Arabs."http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bc1_1424993491MrPhilbyAloisDON'T BLAME ISIS: Iran is Destroying Iraq's Cultural Heritagesaddam, hussein, saladin, sargon, nebuchadnezzar, iraq, assyria, babylonWomen protest against forced mobilization in Ukraine by chanting '<span class="highlight">Glory</span> to Donbas' Thu, 05 Feb 2015 04:03:37 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=df3_1423126869
Lake8737Kramatorsk women organized a rally against the mobilization under the slogan "Glory to the Donbas."
Trying to suppress public opinion, police officers, as well as representatives of the nationalists from Poltava and Sumy regions.http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=df3_1423126869Lake8737Women protest against forced mobilization in Ukraine by chanting '<span class="highlight">Glory</span> to Donbas' china,chinese,ukraine,russiaDrive by footage x 3Mon, 23 Feb 2015 18:49:02 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=047_1424734843
Uncle Neck CutterRevolutionary new way to film fights......Good morning.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=047_1424734843Uncle Neck CutterDrive by footage x 3Fight, Drive by footage, Morning glory, Honor, Fight club: Beach edition.Fri, 13 Feb 2015 21:44:59 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6ac_1423881164
Uncle Neck CutterFights keep breaking out thoughout this VERTICALLY filmed video.http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6ac_1423881164Uncle Neck CutterFight club: Beach edition.Beach, Fight, Douches, Vertical video, Fighting for honor and glory, Proud parents, Canadian War HistorySun, 08 Feb 2015 14:18:17 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a9f_1423422800
tredayHad a little run in with some Russian members who stated Canada has never taken part in any real war. This ones for you un-educated monkeys.http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a9f_1423422800tredayCanadian War HistoryCanada, War, History, Baboons, Russian Putlar Bots, Suck It, Triumph, Death, GloryHow I Became Ukraine's Information WarriorTue, 24 Feb 2015 11:57:49 -0500http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=80c_1424796912
TruelHow I Became Ukraine's Information Warrior
2/24/2015
How I Became Ukraine's Information Warrior
By J.Hawk
As I wrote earlier, yesterday I signed up to become acyber-cyborg so as to spread totally objective and factual information on the endless string of victories won by the beleaguered outpost of Western civilization that is the UAF over the Russo-Mongolian Horde.
Today, new instructions had arrived:
Headquarters of Ukrainian Information TroopsThe second task
Congratulations to you, J.Hawk!
Subscribe to our pages on social networks Facebook, Twitter and facebook. Through them, you will get more information about our struggle.
Also invite your trusted friends to subsbcribe.
To do this you need by visiting our page in Facebook, click 'Invite your friends ... "
For an invitation to Yves facebook page, you need to click on this link, then ask by clicking the appropriate button.
Do not forget to tell your friends about this page news in the film!
You'll receive additional tasks shortly.
Until next time!
-
Sincerely,
Ukrainian Information Troops HQ Then, the next message:
Congratulations to you, J.Hawk!This is the Ukrainian Information Troops HQThe information that was distributed by individual users of social networks, that the service GetResponse, which is used for informational Forces of Ukraine, is Russian - is not true. This can be verified by visiting the official site at http://www.getresponse.com/about.
It specifies that the company was founded in 1999 by Simon Grabowski Pole. Today, GetResponse has many offices around the world, including in Russia, as well as other leading global campaign, for example, Google and Facebook.Given that undermining the trust in Ukrainian information projects is of interest Russian special services, both the users of social networks and journalists need to exercise care.
We respect the privacy of our activists, which is why the registration please only email and name.Glory to Ukraine!-Sincerely,Ukrainian Information Troops HQ
And then the third message:
J.Hawk, keep your account safe!Ukraine Information Troops HQ
Commenting on the news of the enemy you have to understand that you may be blocked or banned at any time because you are spreading the truth. That's what Kremlin's information agents do.Agents of the Kremlin never use their real pages. For this purpose, they create other accounts. Here are the instructions on how to create bots in the Russian Army.
1. Register new mailbox
2. Then register a new page in social networks such as Vkontakte, Facebook, and Twitter Odnoklasniki using the new e-mail.
3. Bots assume common Russian names. For example: "Alexander Ivanov", "Sergei Shevchenko", "Grigoriev Alla" and so on.
4. The user profile form is filled out completely.
5. The City of Residence is often Ukrainian, mostly from the Donbass Region.
6: Avatar - a photograph of a real person. Typically, these photos reflect a graphics editor.
7. The account's photo album is filled with photographs of the "native" city, nature and more. These pictures can be found in social networks or Google image search.
8. The bot starts out by reposting popular pages on general, non-political topics. The user also makes actual personal posts on topic such as cutlets, neighbors, and other similar topics. The idea is to create the impression this is a "live" account.
10. Bots added friends, but no more than 10 a day and no more than 1 in 10 seconds (otherwise they might be blocked by social neetworks). The more friends the bot has, more confidence he is likely to gain.
11. Bots are also subscribe to public pages or groups from their"native" city.
12. Typically, bots do not "friend" true page or pages of their relatives.In order to ensure the Russian fake accounts do not block or ban you, we recommend that you hide your name and personal data..Wait soon for the next task.Till next contact!-Sincerely,Staff Information Forces of Ukraine
I suppose I should be surprised at the sheer crudeness of this operation but, then again, when and where has the junta ever displayed finesse? Or even a modicum of skill?
SHARE ARTICLE:http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=80c_1424796912TruelHow I Became Ukraine's Information WarriorPropaganda. Ukraine.